Kafka comes to Argentina

"When a government is scared, do you think it is any wiser? I tell you, they're not messing around this time. Order is what they're after, and order is being restored. They've got eveyone working double shifts, the goon squads and the garbagemen both."

(page 49)

In The Ministry of Special Cases Nathan Englander tells a story of the Dirty War of Argentina as if in the guise of Isaac Bashevis Singer. The tale is steeped in irony, told through the eyes of a Jew, Kaddish Pozsnan, even outcast from the Jewish community of Buenos Aires.

The theme of the outcast runs wide and deep in this story, from the usual anti-Semitic cultural and physical separation of Jews in Buenos Aires, to the stratification of people within the Jewish community. Kaddish Poznan is the son of a prostitute, part of the despised lower class in the Jewish community, so despised that they weren’t for the longest time even allowed by Jewish authorities to be buried in the city’s only Jewish cemetery. It was only after long debate that the rabbis countenanced a new section of the Jewish cemetery for the lowest in society, although this section had to be separated from the original cemetery by a high solid wall.

Kaddish’s very name connotes the praise of God, a sentiment hardly visible in Kaddish’s life and experience. It also refers to the Jewish prayer for the dead, à propos for a man who’s livelihood was chiseling names off of gravestones so as to reuse them in the low-rent section of the Buenos Aires Jewish cemetery.

When his son Pato the unversity student disappears, his daily battles with his son are replaced with his family’s desperate and disparate attempts to locate their los desaparecido, even with appeals to the Ministry of Special Cases, the Kafkaesque government ministry which might well just disappear you for inquiring about a loved one.

Englander’s considerable novelistic skills are employed here to provide a glimpse of what it would it be like to experience the family’s devastation over a child ‘missing in action,’ in a society which is frozen by the fear of being the next victim.

A gift from Jon and Melinda, and Benn and Jenn. An author recommended by Jenn.

Guillermo Martínez’ short story Infierno Grande (Vast Hell) addresses Argentina’s Dirty War from another perspective. It opens with a rich Argentinean proverb: A small town is a vast hell. The tale centers around the unrestrained small-town gossip about a young drifter and a married woman, whose simultaneous disappearance ends with the accidental discovery of a mass grave, immediately hushed up by the town authorities, and with the reappearance soon afterward of the married woman. Never in their wildest speculation did the townspeople imagine the possibility of secret governmental mass murder.

Recommended by my brother Craig.